'A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare’s Plays Teach Us About Justice': A book review

A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare’s Plays Teach Us About Justice
Kenji Yoshino
Ecco Press, 320 pp., $26.99

Reviewed by Benjamin Ivry
Kenji Yoshino teaches constitutional law at New York University’s School of Law, focusing on civil rights, as he did in his 2006 book, “Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights” (Random House).

“A Thousand Times More Fair” offers a legalistic mind analyzing how Shakespeare’s characters behave, and comparing their actions to personalities and legal events of our own day.

Some of Yoshino’s conclusions are unorthodox; he disses Hamlet: “Like many intellectuals in the grip of an idea, (Hamlet) is largely oblivious to its consequences on others.” Yoshino adds that the Prince of Denmark “wishes to secure not only justice, but poetic justice. … When human beings are perfectionists about justice, we risk doing immense harm.”

Shakespeare probably agreed, as “Hamlet” ends with near-total carnage.
Portia in “The Merchant of Venice,” another character usually admired, likewise earns Yoshino’s scorn since she “misrepresented herself as a lawyer” in a famous scene from the play. In doing so, she bandied words about, but her “rhetorical skill should inspire misgiving. … I initially admire Portia because only she can stop Shylock. By the play’s end, I wonder who can stop her.”

To seal the indictment against Portia, she is compared to Bill Clinton’s 1998 testimony about Monica Lewinsky, in terms of “hairsplitting legalisms.”

By contrast, Yoshino finds “Macbeth” unexpectedly “comforting” in terms of the “justice of the universe” because the bad guys lose — i.e.: the “Macbeths die miserably.”

Also unexpectedly, Yoshino has kind words to say about one of the Bard’s goriest creep-fests, “Titus Andronicus” (people’s hands cut off; people baked into pies, etc.), less for its bloodiness than its “serious message about the necessity of the rule of law.”

Yoshino suggests that “our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq … are not truly wars, but vendettas.” Accordingly, the “fragility of the rule of law,” as expressed in that ultimate of unpleasant plays, “Titus Andronicus,” has fresh relevance for readers and theatergoers today.

Neither a prosecutor nor a defense lawyer herein, Yoshino is a refreshingly engaging advocate for Shakespeare.Benjamin Ivry is an author and writer from Manhattan.